As everyone wants to use and experience modern technology, we are heading towards modernization. Every single step that you have taken with these modern devices may contain your personal information that you don’t want to disclose in front of anyone. For instance, the photograph clicked by your smartphone contains lots of information that can be revealed easily without your knowledge. Some smartphones use your location and time and save these details with the photo that you have shot that time.
If anyone gets access to your phone, then he/she can easily see those details from the application, which may breach your privacy. If you prefer more privacy, then you might not want to share these details with anyone.
It is very difficult to hide these things, but you can distract others by taking a screenshot of that image and deleting the original one. The screenshot doesn’t contain the original location or time. That image only contains metadata like time and place when the screenshot was taken.
But in today’s era, it is not sufficient to divert your metadata. There are the latest tools and techniques that can collect all the information like personal identity from your images. Here are some of the things that you should think about before sharing any image.
Characters in your photo
The main focus of the taking images is to capture memories with your family and friends. There is facial recognition technique that can easily identify anyone in your photo.
Some governments or law enforcement agencies use this technique to maintain law and order or have tight surveillance on someone as they have the database of all the individuals. Most of the time, they use it in their investment so that they can catch the criminal.
Now the law enforcement agency is using this technique which is provided by the Clearview AI company. Recently, a media organization reported that Clearview AI had obtained more than 3 billion faces that they can identify. According to tech experts, the Clearview application is more powerful than any facial recognition tool, which is used by several law enforcement agencies. But the only concern with this application is that they are allowing others to use their technology, which is not at all a good sign for your privacy.
However, it is still difficult for civilians to access this tool. But when you post any photo on Facebook, it can automatically recognize the faces that are the part of those images. Even Google and Apple also use face recognition techniques.
Yandex, a search engine uses more powerful face recognition technology, and it is the site that can find similar faces recognized in the photo. Sometimes, when you search an image in reverse google image, it shows the pictures which are identical to that in respect to the color, shape and size, but the face is different.
A comment came from Google that they use less powerful face recognition techniques than the Yandex. Google’s tool will only help you to find the matching images, which is quite different from the Yandex application. You can get all the other information about this tool from Google on their official site.
Location of the photo taken
If you allowed your phone’s camera to access the location, then you will find the exact location of the captured image in the metadata. If you didn’t allow the location, then also it is possible to find out the precise location of the picture by the new investigative techniques.
The background, store, street signs, hoardings, and even your T-shirt can give a clue about the language of that particular region. These things also provide an estimated view of the location of the clicked picture. Some of the historic or parks or monuments are easier to search locations and other details through the tools. Even the reflection seen in your image is sufficient enough to track geolocation. Recently, a Japanese pop star was stalked and assaulted by a man, who traces her location from the reflection of the building. He saw the reflection in her sunglasses in a post.
This act is human intelligence, but computers can do much more than this that can identify the location automatically.
If you have uploaded any GPS disabled image, then you might see some location-based information on your photo. At that part, Google uses its algorithm to determine the location of non-GPS based images. They will compare the photos with some similar images from their data to find out the location.
Google is not the only software that can identify the exact location of the image. PeakVisor is another software or application that uses automated detection tools to detect the location too precisely. But it allows the users to upload their images with the added location which matches the mountains, hills, and mountains.
If you are uploading an image that contains any building, mountain or any landscape, then you should assume that your location can be tracked down easily. So, pre-assume these things.
Pretty Hard to Identify The Time and Date
Yes, it is truly hard to identify the time and date, but it is not impossible. Most of the time, it can be identified easily with the weather, lights and natural features.
The weather condition shown in the image can give more specific clues than you think. WolframAlpha is one of the organizations that can provide more precise data from the weather station like temperature, cloud cover and many more. These things are sufficient enough to confirm the date and time when the image is taken.
Always Zoom in Before you Post any Photo
It is too simple to zoom any image before posting to check the presence of any instance or background info. You may ask your friends to look at the image as you don’t find anything serious as you saw them daily. If they catch something, then edit them before posting.
Ava Williams is a Microsoft Office expert and has been working in the technology industry since 2002. As a technical expert, she has written technical blogs, manuals, white papers, and reviews for many websites such as office.com/setup.
Source : Photo Reveal
